University of Waterloo

The proposed postdoctoral research focuses on addressing the challenges associated with energy access in developing countries as well as promoting energy-independent communities in Canada in a bid to promote sustainable development. The study would investigate a consortium-like financing model for small and medium scale renewable energy projects in which energy service companies are financed by a number of investors to in order to reduce the investment risks.

Foamed concrete is a low-density product, created by blending a cement paste with a foaming agent. The foam is stable during the set-up of the concrete, resulting in fine, evenly distributed voids within the concrete matrix.
In addition to its low density, properties of foam concrete include pumpability as a fresh concrete mix; and sound absorption and thermal resistance (relative to standard concrete) when cast.

Global population growth, urbanization and changing climate patterns have increased the demand for potable water, wastewater reuse and value recovery from wastewater, and treatment of industrial process water. Population growth also results in increased demand for the shipping of goods by ocean freight, with the associated risk of the transport of unwanted marine life from one location to another by the discharge of ballast water.

Powder Metallurgy (PM) is a production method suitable for accurately fabricating complex shapes to a desired size and shape, thus minimizing the need for machining. This makes it cost effective in comparison to other manufacturing technologies.
In order to facilitate the production of PM parts, a lubricant is added to the iron based powder during mixing. The lubricant affects the internal friction between the particles during compaction as well as reduces the total energy needed to eject the part from the die after compaction.

The collection of bacteria and archaea in an ecosystem is termed the microbiome. This microbiome is critically important to the structure and function of essentially any ecosystem, providing many ecosystem services, such as growth promotion, nutrient turnover, and impacts on organismal health. The vast majority of these organisms, however, are unknown to science for a variety of reasons. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing of environmental samples provide a significant data resource to help understand these organisms.

In 2011, Statistics Canada reported that women comprised only 25% of total farmer numbers. At the same time, an aging male farmer population is causing concern that if the farming sector does not broaden its appeal among women, there will be significant economic implications for its future development. The Egg Farmers of Canada wants to encourage more women to take up egg farming and support existing female producers in their leadership goals, but more knowledge about the systemic reasons for womens limited participation in the industry is needed.

West 5 community in London, Ontario, will pursue high penetration of electric vehicles, and is exploring an innovative marketing program of including them with the sale of each new condominium unit. The primary objective of this project is to determine an economical approach to create an acceptable infrastructure for these electric vehicles that will be desired by the community. The study will evaluate how to improve the efficiency of using Solar Energy to charge vehicles battery and for other DC loads in the London West 5 community.

Denial of service attacks deny a service, such as visiting a website or access to a network, by deliberately congesting the server or the network resources. In addition to delivering digital contents to end-users, content delivery networks (CDNs) are supposed to protect the content origins, such as Netflix or Amazon Video, against denial of service threats. However, denial of service attacks not only evade a CDNs protection but also exploit its resources to damage content providers and the CDN itself. As such, traditional security mechanisms are no longer sufficient.

The intern will use the companys proprietary biomaterials to create tumors using cancer cells. These tumors can be used as an alternative to animal testing for cancer drugs. These cancer models will cost a fraction of the cost of animal models and can be tested using existing pharmaceutical techniques and equipment. The intern will develop a process to create tumors, then test existing drugs on the model to see how it compares to human and animal testing results.

Environmental modelling and monitoring software systems, which are very important in assessing the effects of climate change, require open data from a large number of sources including all levels of government, NGOs such as watershed management authorities, consultants and business. This data needs to be brought together into internal databases and to be kept up-to-date to perform the required underlying computations. Collecting this data manually and keeping it current requires an incredible amount of error-prone manual labour.